Host’s Pride Rests on an Aging, and Aching, Star Skater

It has long been difficult to imagine Russia’s first Winter Olympics without Yevgeny Plushenko, and now that will no longer be necessary.

Despite having barely competed in the last two years and despite having finished second at this season’s Russian national figure skating championships — he skipped the European championships altogether — Plushenko, 31, was handed Russia’s only men’s singles spot for the Sochi Games on Wednesday.

That was no great surprise in light of Plushenko’s past and prominence, but it was not without debate or risk.

“I have kind of a life philosophy that nostalgia’s expensive,” Scott Hamilton, a former Olympic gold medalist who is now an NBC commentator, said in an interview Wednesday. “What I’m saying is that to take such a bold stance as to send Yevgeny after all the surgeries he’s had over the last four, eight years and having not seen him really on the stage having a logical momentum going into the Olympics, they must know something pretty substantial to make that decision to send him as the sole participant.”

The decision came after a highly unusual closed-door mock competition session on Tuesday in which Plushenko performed his free program for top Russian figure skating officials and reportedly completed two quadruple jumps, one in combination. The federation’s selections are subject to approval from the Russian Olympic Committee.

“I had no room for error,” Plushenko later told the Russian publication Sovietsky Sport.

Perhaps not, but Plushenko, the sharp-featured former wunderkind who rose from poverty to become a triple Olympic medalist and one of the most successful figure skaters, clearly had name recognition and public sentiment on his side, as well as a long history of handling pressure in a sport in which margins for error are as thin as a skate blade.

The N.H.L. star Alex Ovechkin, one of the few Russian winter sports stars with a higher profile than Plushenko, has already said that Plushenko, if named to the team, should be the one carrying the Russian flag at the opening ceremony at the country’s first home Olympics in 34 years.

It is not clear whether Plushenko would be available for that honor. This will be the first Olympics with a team event in figure skating, and it begins Feb. 6, the day before the opening ceremony.

But there is no doubt that Sochi has been the motivation for pushing through the pain in recent years.

“I have not seen him in person since an exhibition we did in Berlin a year ago, and all he could talk about was Sochi, Sochi, Sochi,” said Daniel Weiss, a former German skater turned television analyst. “Sochi was everything for him.”

This is Plushenko’s latest comeback. He skipped three years of elite competition because of major injuries and outside interests before returning for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, where he finished second to the American Evan Lysacek in a competition best remembered for the controversy over quadruple jumps (Plushenko had one; Lysacek did not).

Before the Vancouver Games, Plushenko was asked in an interview whether he could still see himself competing in Sochi.

“I don’t know yet; they would like, they would like,” he said, referring to his fellow Russians. Given his age, he added, “it’s going to be too hard.”

It has proved difficult indeed. His last success in a major international event came at the 2012 European championships in Sheffield, England, where he won his seventh European title in grand style. But serious back problems set him back after that, and he has required at least two operations to address disk damage brought on by the years of pounding that go with attempting triple and quadruple jumps.

This season, his only appearances were at a minor event in Riga, Latvia, which he won, and at the Russian national championships, where he struggled with his jumps in the free skate and finished second to the 18-year-old Maxim Kovtun. It was Plushenko’s first loss in that competition since 1998.

But while Plushenko chose not to take part in last week’s European championships in Budapest, Kovtun cracked under pressure in his free program and finished fifth over all. Two other Russian men, Sergei Voronov and Konstantin Menshov, finished second and third, behind Spain’s Javier Fernández.

The door, if it was ever closed, was open again for Plushenko.

“Sure, it’s pressure,” Weiss said of the closed-door session. “It’s not a practice. Yevgeny knows that, but I personally think the decision was made before.”

Plushenko now has a chance to become the second figure skater to win four Olympic medals. Gillis Grafstrom of Sweden won three golds and a silver from 1920 to 1932. Plushenko took silver behind his compatriot Aleksei Yagudin in 2002; gold in 2006; and silver in 2010.

The team event looks like his best chance in Sochi in light of Russia’s strength in women’s singles and pairs.

“I think with him in the team competition, that definitely helps them a great deal,” Hamilton said. “Just the fact that if he remains vertical, he’s going to pull the component scores because he has that relationship with the very established group of international judges.”

Hamilton added that consistency was an important element because the team event was the first of the Olympics. It will set the tone for Russia, especially after Vancouver, where Russian skaters won only two medals.

The individual event, where Patrick Chan of Canada is the clear favorite, is a more daunting prospect if Plushenko takes part in it.

“If he does what he did at the Russian national championships, he has no chance to medal in Sochi,” Weiss said. “You need at least one quad, if not a second quad, to medal. That’s No. 1. And No. 2, does he have the fitness to get through the tremendously hard program you have to showcase nowadays?”

Correction:

An article in some editions on Jan. 23 about Russia’s selecting Yevgeny Plushenko for its only spot in men’s figure skating at the Sochi Olympics included a quotation from the NBC commentator Scott Hamilton that misstated Russia’s performance in figure skating at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. Russia won two medals, a silver by Plushenko and a bronze by the ice dancing team of Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin; Plushenko’s was not “the only figure skating medal they won.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Host’s Pride Rests on an Aging, and Aching, Star Skater. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe